


What Myka Bering doesn't tell anyone.

by ChameleonPrints



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Evolution, F/F, Gen, Implied Femslash, Season 2, Season 3, thought process
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-07
Updated: 2013-03-07
Packaged: 2017-12-04 14:57:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/712007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChameleonPrints/pseuds/ChameleonPrints
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the train of thoughts of Myka Bering from the moment she leaves the Warehouse at the end of season 2 to the moment she decides to go back at the end of 3x01. Obviously it involves Helena.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Myka Bering doesn't tell anyone.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Djinns](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Djinns).



As she drove away from the Warehouse, Myka was filled with nothing but anger. She felt like a rat in a cage; she punched the steering wheel a couple times before pushing down on the brakes and stopping by the side of the road. How could she have been so stupid, so blind? She wished she could blame it all on an artifact, but _she_ was the rotten apple, and she had to come to terms with that.

And then there was Pete, who didn’t even tell her; Pete, who kept quiet on his gut feelings because he trusted her. But he trusted the wrong person in the end, because her own judgment was worthless. That much was sadly obvious now.

She slammed the door of the car and began walking straight ahead, into nothingness. She liked the red dust that coated everything here, in the deserted badlands. Here, there was no distraction from the self-hatred which filled her. She embraced it, almost screaming it out into the desert. Helena was like her, she thought. She embraced that will to accomplish more, to do and be better, pursuing that same thirst for knowledge and discovery. They both loved the Warehouse, she thought, because it showed them endless wonder and renewed possibilities... It provided food for the brain and rest for the soul.

So how could she have been so wrong?

Thirsty and tired, Myka let herself fall to the ground, her eyes dry from the dust. What was she going back to?

Of course, her decision had been rash. But she’d had to leave right then and there, because if she had waited even a moment longer, she knew she never would have left. She’d have let herself be sucked back in by the chaotic, yet soothing rhythm of their little life and death adventures, despite knowing that as time passed, her hate for the Warehouse would have grown like cancer. At least this way, she had made a clean break. She didn’t want to resent the place and its people – her family. It was her own damn fault, anyway: she deserved the exile. If they couldn’t be the ones to throw the first stone, she’d readily flog herself, because that’s who she was, true to the core.

And HG… It wasn’t possible to blame HG. Something inside her clenched at the very idea. Of course, it should have been her fault, logically. But given the void of information supplied by the damned Regents, and given Helena’s possible… disappearance… she couldn’t go there. Artie had known. Pete had felt something. She should have, too. It wasn’t Helena’s fault, because Helena was gone. What happened to criminals who were so terrible they weren’t even allowed to be bronzed? Was there a special team of agents who disposed of them? Myka shut her eyes at the idea and heaved a sigh.

Somewhere something said that if HG had been… _terminated_ … it should have been she who pulled the trigger. Forever destined to meet at gunpoint, eh? Well then, she, Myka Bering, Secret-Service-turned-Warehouse-Agent, should have been the one to carry the weight of that condemnation. _She_ had been the one to deliver the key to the hell that woman had tried to raise, after all. She should have pulled the trigger, or triggered the artifact, or done whatever needed to be done to end that particular evil. And because she hadn’t been allowed to – because Helena had disappeared somewhere in the belly of the governmental beast – she would forever carry that evil with her.

She shouldn’t be welcome at the Warehouse. Not after this. Shouldn’t have been in the first place.

She did manage to scramble herself up and drag her tired body to the car. The lonely ride home passed in complete silence as her mind went back and forth between happy memories and pure torture. A cleanse. Maybe bringing it all back would erase it forever from her mind – for she didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to think, ever again.

In time, when Artie or Mrs. Frederic came around to ask her to come back, she started despising them a little, as well. She’d smile, she’d be perfectly polite and bland, but she’d be hurt for them, hurt that they stooped to her level – the level of someone who was stupid enough to be betrayed, to be played like a common mark.

She missed Pete and she missed Claudia and even the idea of Leena – or maybe it was the Bed and Breakfast – but she didn’t want to face Artie. He should have slapped her, yelled at her, but instead he acted uncharacteristically sweet, trying to trap her with honey. She wanted desperately to shout at him, remind him that she was a fool, and tell him that coming to her made him a fool, too.

Yes, eventually, the anger dissipated. It had to. She didn’t have the energy to maintain it. She got busy, returning to her literary roots, comforted by the dusty scent of the old bookstore. It was home, and with her now-healthier relationship with her father, she was okay to just remain in that stasis for as long as necessary; some part of her hoped that was forever.

She liked to run her fingers along the cracked spines. Sometimes it brought her far back into her own past, sometimes into someone else’s. It was a wonderful reality to live in, one where you could simply hold the book that hurt you and everything would be okay again. She would sit on the floor and stare up at all those discolored bindings and feel as though she were in the midst of an everlasting autumn, of glowing red and orange and brown, with speckles of dusty greens. The fancier books shone with their gold lettering in their own section. She could forget everything for just a moment with the simple caress of a drawing in a very old picture book. It was quiet there, all the sounds bounced slowly into the freckled light streaming through the large windows, disappearing into carpets and between huge volumes of history and architecture…

But while the books absorbed the hatred, they didn’t remove the aching pain of knowing how unfair everything still was; of understanding how not right she had made things; of realizing that, though she may have stopped the worst from happening, there was still damage there she would never repair. Never _could_.

When Pete walked into her store that day, she had almost forgotten about him. She had let go of her dreams of purple goo, and her hands didn’t shy away from the very old and odd volumes she stumbled upon sometimes, those that reminded her of artifacts. The danger had passed. She carried a needle in her heart but her mind had floated away from all of it. But it was all too easy for her one-time partner to grab the string of that mind-balloon and tether to his current problems. She got carried away without noticing because, surely, all it contained was harmless fun… Well, okay, it was a little harmful. But she did want it. It sent the clock going backward and the summer sun reaching into her autumn. It felt warm on her skin while they were there, though it stung a little, to feel it again and to have this new-Myka-person standing by Pete, so she didn’t let herself feel. Mostly, she didn’t allow herself to think, and so she dug into the research and ran after them to help.

But coming back, coming home, after having briefly opened that window again – to settle back into her autumn – it felt _off_. Instead, the cold winter reached her, and she felt unbalanced, as if she were going to tip over now at any moment. She felt restless. Images flooded her brain, images that the books simply couldn’t seem to put to rest anymore. The weighty image of Helena, her face, her outstretched hand… That hand that held weapons – the Minoan Trident, the Tesla, the gun. But also that hand that reached for her, that same arm that was wrapped around her to lift her from danger with the aid of that ingenious grappler, that safe hand she once trusted. She felt shivers along her spine, her autumn leaving her, pulling away, as the memories resurfaced… That same hand she had to face in Warehouse 2. Which was it?

They were leaving, and she was going to be alone again, and it was terrifying. But then Mrs. Frederic interrupted that train of thought. And the unexpected happened.

She was allowed to know. She had assumed that everyone was sworn to secrecy and, well, that this meant something terrible. But HG was now standing in front of her, peaceful and alive. It was both completely impossible and completely amazing. It didn’t change the fact that she had been fooled, but all that seemed to slip her mind as the calm voice of Helena reached out to her. It was terrifying because it contradicted every assumption she’d made up to this point, but ultimately for Myka it was helpful to be proven wrong. It was freeing.

In a way, it was the knowledge that Helena was only a hologram that allowed her to reach out. She could touch her, even if she couldn’t. She could reach and it was okay, as there was nothing to be reached. She did not have to think about handling the full sensory experience right then. Something started to glow and smile inside of her, as if she only just now understood why she had allowed herself to be fooled before.

She wanted Helena to stay longer. She had forgotten about Mrs. Frederic, she had forgotten about the Warehouse and the bookstore and what was expected of her, just for a moment. She didn’t have a certain path any longer. She had a moment, a very precise and perfect and unavoidably short moment of clarity. In a way, she figured she was just being fooled again, because HG held that power over her. But if she always had and still could now, even after Myka had seen all the horrors she had been capable of… perhaps it was okay to have been fooled then. After all, it brought her this opportunity. Now that Helena wasn’t dead – wasn’t completely _gone_ – she could forgive her. And if she could forgive a criminal who had held billions of lives in her hand, she could forgive herself. And she could probably forgive the Warehouse for keeping it a secret.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written as a birthday present, and received the help of dww13 (from Tumblr) as a bêta reader, without whom this would have been a big chaotic mess.


End file.
